Goodbye
to our American-Japanese friends, off to catch a plane to Miami. It's been
great seeing them.
Stand
by for a tenuous link… I've been reading Lost in Shangri-la by
Michael Zuckoff, an account of a plane crash & rescue operation in what
was, not eastern Tibet as one might think, but Dutch New Guinea in May 1945 at
the tail end of the Pacific War. Of the 24 U.S. army personnel on board, only
three survived, finding themselves in the middle of a remote, unexplored*
valley inhabited by 'stone-age' tribes who constantly fought each other and
often resorted to cannibalism, plus there was the added spice of a few hiding
Japanese soldiers. Possibly.
Luckily,
a rescue plane spotted them and two medics were parachuted in to tend to their
injuries. But how to get them out? The jungle was too impenetrable to walk
through, the air to thin for a helicopter and nowhere long enough to land a
conventional plane. So what they did was to land a glider, which doesn't need
much of a runway, which was then snatched back up by a regular plane with a
hook, flying very low. They both then flew back to the airbase, one towing the
other, before landing separately. Amazing.
Incidentally,
much to the disappointment of the world's press, the 'natives' were friendly
and there were no Japanese.
[*
Actually, unbeknownst to all concerned, it had been explored, by Richard
Archibold in 1938]
No comments:
Post a Comment